Sunday, 13 October 2013

The Persuaders! Italian Super8 films

Long before Blu-ray, DVD, VHS and Betamax, Super8mm films were king of the home film entertainment.Back in the day we had a Super8mm projector but most of the home movies we had were us as kids playing in the late 60s and nothing as exciting as a TV series like The Persuaders! You could buy edited versions of films or single reel clips of TV shows but all that kind of went over our heads, besides they were pretty expensive too.A number of ITC shows were given the Super8mm treatment in the 70s including The Baron, The Champions, Department S, Jason King, The Protectors, Strange Report and The Persuaders! - and these were released not only in the UK but also in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. The Persuaders! fared better than most in that the Super8mm releases were made up of three 14 minute reels, so only approximately 8 minutes was cut from an episode - some of the other series fared worse in only having two reels giving them a running time of 28 minutes.Techno Film produced three Super8mm of The Persuaders! in both the UK and Italy and pictured below are the rare Italian versions. The episodes are Chain of Events (Catena Di Eventi), A Death In The Family(Morte in Famiglia) and The Old, The New and The Deadly (L'Aquila Di Bronzo).

2 comments:

I had (still have, in fact) Chain of Events and The Old, the New and the Deadly. I got them in the late 1980s at one for the annual film fairs fun in Blackpool by the much-missed Derrann Films. At the time it was absolutely the only way to see any Persuaders episodes and I treasured these Super 8 prints greatly. Among other things I also got a complete print of the UFO episode Exposed. There were also 400ft versions that were cut to incomprehensibility.